Friday, July 20, 2012

Being an aunt is one of the most awesome things I can think of. I truly love my nieces as if they were my own...mostly because they are so darn cute. Sadly, they don't live close by, so I Facebook stalk my sister every day, hoping to get a glimpse of how much they've grown. Next weekend I'll forgo the Facebook stalking for actual stalking and fly out to get a real glimpse of these little munchkins. YAY! Hooray for summer vacation. It's perfect timing too, because baby fever is at an all time high.

Sigh...if only I could be 2 again. Naked painting in the summer heat...what's better than that? Even 8 months would be fun...I mean, look at little squishy's hair. When else can girls rock the fohawk?

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

It feels VERY good to say that I'm finally done with Uprising content edits (or at least this first round)...okay maybe not DONE done, but, done-ish. There's something about the first time you print out your manuscript to read on paper. That thick stack of words just isn't the same when it's a number on your computer screen. Now that I'm done with all the content changes, I'm doing my read-throughs, and I've officially got the red pen out to mark it up. Of course I'm finding small changes as I read, but I don't expect anything big to pop up (though you never know).

One of my writing ticks is repeating words or character actions (nods, looks, laughs, etc.) I catch most of those kinds of things on paper. As I was reading through Uprising this morning I was finding them (of course)...so how does my brain react? Hmmm...I better watch an episode of Vampire Diaries and analyze what characters do with their hands, their facial expressions, how they interact...you know, so I can fill in those repeats with other detail. Any girl's logical reaction to character analysis, right? No? Just me?

Okay, so maybe it was an excuse to watch cute guys and give my eyes a break, but it actually helped! As I was watching I was making my list. I don't know...it was pretty fun.

I know you're all here to find out the good stuff, though, so I'll stop ranting about TVD and get to the cover. Lots and lots of you are getting anxious about the cover :) I know...me too. I'll be revealing it shortly. Sometime in August I believe. I've seen a few drafts, but nothing final yet. When I do release it, I hope some of you will help me spread the word! I'll probably do a sign up form a little later for anyone who wants to participate in the reveal. You can also email me if you want to be involved as well.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Yeah yeah...I know I'm a little behind in the news. This image was released a while ago, but for the sake of those who are just as behind as I am. Here is the latest on the Hunger Games movies.

People are saying she looks too skinny, but come on. It's always, she's too this or too that... I think it looks awesome. I'm pretty excited about it.

Let's talk dates. So, the Hunger Games DVD has yet to be released, which is why I'm probably still pumped about the movie stuff. I want to watch it again. It's scheduled to be available on August 18, 2012.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Don't you just love cover reveals? :) I can't wait to show you the Uprising (Children of the Gods #2) cover, but that probably won't be for another month.

In the meantime, fellow author Tracy Deebs has a book coming out. I met Tracy at a book event here in San Diego. We were on a panel together talking to readers and signing books. Tracy is also the author of the Tempest series (Tempest Rising&Tempest Unleashed).

Her new book is titled Doomed. Ready for the cover?

Drum roll........

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Publisher: Walker Books for Young Readers

Pub Date: January 8, 2013

Hardcover

Beat the Game, Save the World.

One Stuxnet
type worm,

One
Greek-themed MMO,

One real
world scavenger hunt,

Three
teenagers on the run

And a
ten-day countdown to total nuclear annihilation.

Pandora’s
Box isn’t just a myth anymore …

When
seventeen-year-old Pandora Walker opens an email attachment, she uploads the
most frightening worm ever invented—and in doing so, brings about total
technological Armageddon. Everything from the internet to communications to utilities
collapses and suddenly Pandora finds herself on the run from Homeland Security,
the FBI and every police department in the country, all of whom blame her for
the technological wasteland sweeping across the U.S..With the help of stepbrothers Eli and Theo,
her neighbors and the two hottest guys in school-- plus codes encrypted in a
world famous MMO--she sets out on a
real life scavenger hunt that only she can solve.A scavenger hunt that pits her against one of
the most brilliant men in the world—the maker of the Pandora worm.Her father.Only by unraveling the clues left by him in the MMO, and in real-world
places around the U.S., can they hope to beat the clock ticking the days off until
the entire planet is Doomed.

Excerpt

“That’s not the really puzzling part,” Agent
Lessing finally continues.“Especially
if you insist on your innocence in this matter, how is it that starting at
seven-fifteen this morning, someone from this IP address opened the twelve
different sections of code that make up this worm and uploaded them onto the
internet, one by one?”

Emily gasps and I want to protest.I want to tell the FBI agent that she’s
crazy.That I have no idea what she’s
talking about.But the truth of the
matter is that suddenly I do.I know
exactly what I was doing at seven-fifteen this morning.

The tentative fairy tale I’ve been building in my
head all day—the one I wasn’t even aware of until right now—collapses.I swear, I feel it shatter and my stomach,
though close to empty, chooses that moment to revolt.

I spring up
from my chair.

“Hey, you can’t go anywhere.Sit back down!”Lessing tells me firmly, reaching into her
jacket and pulling out her gun.

I don’t stop; I can’t.Even so, I barely make it to the trash can in
time.I don’t know how long I sit there,
puking my guts up, but by the time I finish, Lessing has put away her gun.Emily is looking at me in dismay, while
Mackaray and Lundstrom—who rushed in at Lessing’s alarmed shout—are wearing
identical expressions of smug triumph.Even Lessing seems satisfied, and I know it’s because I’ve blown it big
time.

It’s pretty hard to protest your innocence when you get
so upset by what they’re telling you that you hurl.

I don’t get up right away.Instead, I stay on the floor, my head resting
against the cool wood of a cabinet.I
think about my laptop, stuffed in my backpack, with all the incriminating
evidence on it.I think about what else
is in the bag—namely the pictures from my father that I’d shoved in there at
the last minute.All twelve of them.

I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to figure out why me,
and the answer has been there all along.The psychopath who did this, the one who chose me as this harbinger of
destruction, is my father.

He did this to
me.Used my curiosity against me—and the
world—and turned me into a modern-day Pandora.Like my namesake before me, I’ve brought a new kind of evil into the
world and there’s no going back.Maybe
Emily’s dad and the others can fix it.Maybe they can’t.But either way,
I have a feeling that deep, dark hole they want to throw me in just got a lot
deeper and darker.

Every writing campaign I’ve ever partaken in for Amnesty
International flashes through my head.Letter after letter about Guantanamo Bay.Sierra Leon.Somalia.Story after story of Americans
taken to foreign countries and tortured because they’re suspected of
terrorism.

Even as I tell myself I’m being silly, I hear the
president saying the United States doesn’t tolerate terrorists.That’s what I am, what my father has turned
me into with a few strokes of my keyboard, a few picture downloads that I
thought were to celebrate my seventeenth birthday.

A cyber terrorist.

I reach for the trash can again as dry heaves shake my
entire body.

What am I going to do?What am I going to do?What. Am. I. Going. To. Do?

Behind me, I hear movement and brace myself to be yanked
to my feet.But that doesn’t
happen.Instead, Emily settles on the
ground next to me and hands me a bottle of water.I rinse my mouth out, drink a few sips.Then she’s hugging me, stroking my hair.“It’s going to be okay, Pandora,” she
whispers to me.“I promise. It’s going
to be okay.”

I open my mouth, plan on telling them everything and
begging for mercy.Instead, only four
words come out.Four words I never thought
I’d say.“I want a lawyer.”

“A lawyer?”Mackaray’s eyes gleam with triumph as he crouches down next to me.“Pandora, where you’re going, lawyers rank
right up there with fairies and unicorns as mythical creatures.”

“Your father is one of an elite few who could pull off
something of this magnitude, Ms. Wood.”Lundstrom speaks up for the first time in a long while.“So I suggest you close your mouth unless you
want to bring a lot of trouble down on him as well.”

Emily shuts up then, her eyes wide and frightened as she
presses her back against the cabinet, almost like she wants to shrink
inside.The arms wrapped around me start
to tremble, but I barely notice since I’m shaking just as hard.

“She didn’t do anything,” I tell them, wondering if I
should just tell them everything?

If I should send them next door to retrieve my
laptop from Eli and Theo and get them involved in this?

Do I admit that my father is behind this and let
them arrest him, lock him up and throw away the key like they’re threatening to
do to me?But if I admit I had an
unwitting part in this, are they going to believe me?The looks on their faces say no, that they’ve
already made up their minds about my guilt.My best bet, then, is to wait for Mr. Wood.He’s one of the best computer security guys
in the country.He’ll know what to do.

I shut down then, refuse to say anything
else.They keep asking me questions, but
I ignore them.Even when Mackaray grabs
onto my arms and lifts me into a standing position, I don’t protest.I’ll wait for Mr. Wood, I tell myself.He’ll be able to fix this.

As we wait, the house grows quiet around me.The front door opens and closes numerous
times and I hear the slam of car doors outside.The rev of engines that mark the end of the search.Everyone else has done their jobs and now I’m
left alone with these three.

Mr. Wood finally arrives, with a police
escort.He’s all outrage and concern as
he wraps his arms around us, but it becomes clear very quickly that he won’t be
able to help me.He’s not my parent or
guardian and no matter how much he argues with the agents—he knows two of them
personally—they aren’t budging.But at
least Emily seems safe, and that’s something.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say, after Mr.
Wood’s been here about an hour.They’ve
told him both he and Emily are free to go, but he hasn’t budged.I know it’s because he doesn’t want to leave
me alone with them.

“Tough,” Lundstrom tells me.“You’re not going anywhere.”

“Jesus, Mike, she’s just a kid!”Mr. Wood exclaims.

“She unleashed cyber Armageddon—computer genius
trumps kid every day of the week.”

“Please,” I say.“I really need to use the restroom.”Even though I don’t.I just want a couple of minutes alone to
think, a couple of minutes where they aren’t staring at me like a bug under a
microscope.

“I’ll take her,” Mackaray finally says, and I
almost change my mind.I don’t want to
be alone with him, even for as long as it takes to walk to my bathroom.But it’s not like I have a choice now, not
after I made such a big deal of having to go.

We leave the kitchen together and when I try to
head upstairs to my bathroom, he grabs my elbow and directs me to the half-bath
down the hall.The one without any
windows.I shake my head in
disbelief.They already think I’m some
kind of genius hacker-- now they think I can mastermind an escape from federal
custody as well?Who the hell do these
people think I am?

“Leave the door open,” Mackaray tells me when we
get there.

“What?” I stare at him incredulously.

“You heard me.”The face staring back at me is implacable.

“Where am I going to go?There’s no other way out of the bathroom!”

“Take it or leave it.”Something moves in his eyes and I know he’s
waiting for me to leave it.But I won’t
give him the satisfaction.

The hand on my elbow gets tighter, his fingers
digging into my flesh until I start to see stars.He pulls me towards him and whispers, “You
don’t want to play games with me, little girl.I win every time.”

I’m straining so hard in the other direction that
when he finally lets me go, I stumble, crack my funny bone hard against the
door frame. He laughs, at me and at the
helpless tears of pain that spring to my eyes.

I go into the bathroom, leaving the door partially
ajar.I turn on the faucet, splash water
on my face, blink back the tears.

“Hurry up!” he says after a minute.“We don’t have all night.”

Before I can respond, the lights blink once,
twice, then go out completely.My entire
house is plunged into an inky blackness.

“What the hell!”Mackaray says, slamming the bathroom door open all the way.“Either get it done or not, kid.You’ve got one minute and then I’m taking you
back to the kitchen.”

I barely hear him over the pounding of my own
heart and the panic clawing through me, trumping everything else.Even my fear of going to jail.I hate the dark, hate it, hate it, hate
it.Ever since I was five and ended up
getting trapped in my uncle’s storage shed, under a pile of heavy boxes that
fell when I was looking for my Christmas presents.There’d been no lights, or windows, and I’d
laid there in the dark for hours, crying, convinced that no one was ever going
to find me.

Curiosity had been my downfall then as well.

“Tom?”Lessing’s voice drifts through the hall.

“Yeah?”

“Just checking.It looks like the whole grid just went down.”

“I can see that.”Lessing must catch the sarcasm in his voice because she shuts up
quickly.

“Pandora—“In his voice is a warning and I know my time is up.But he stops abruptly and there’s a muffled
thump, followed by a slithering sound that has me imagining a bunch of snakes
sliding down my hallway.I press myself
back against the wall and try not to scream.

Something large moves in front of the
doorway.“Pandora?”

“Theo?” I whisper incredulously.

He leans forward, until his face is only
centimeters from mine.“Let’s go.”His voice is pitched so low that I have to
strain to hear it even this close.

“Go where?”

“Out of here.Come on, we’ve only got a couple of minutes before they come looking for
you.”

“Looking for—you want me to break out of federal
custody?”

“Would you rather I leave you here?”

“I don’t know.I—“ My head is spinning.Of all
the ways I envisioned tonight ending, this wasn’t even in the top
thousand.“Where’s Mackaray?”

“I hit him.He’s out, but I don’t know for how long.Now are you coming or not?”

Am I?I
look back at the kitchen, where Emily and her father wait with the other
agents.I can’t leave her—

It’s like Theo can read my thoughts, because he
says, “Emily will be fine.She’s not the
one in trouble here.”

He’s right; I know he is.But still.Can I do this?Bad enough to be a
federal suspect—but to be a fugitive?How is it even possible?They’ll
find us in minutes.

Except, the electricity just went out.Communications are gone.No cameras to catch us running by.No way to get out word of a widespread
manhunt (or in this case womanhunt).No
way for them to track me when they’re basically blind, deaf and dumb. It could
work.

But still, do I really want to do this?Do I really want to go down this road?

Hell, yes, I do.

I slip my hand into Theo’s, not bothering to ask
how he knew I was in trouble, and we glide as silently as possible through the
hallway into the living room.He seems
to know exactly where he’s going and I wonder how long he’s been here, prowling
around the house, without anyone knowing.

He slides open the glass door that leads to the
deck just enough that we can slip out.As he silently closes the door behind us, I realize this is it.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Wow. So it's 8:00 at night and I JUST realized that I completely spaced my Wednesday blog post. I'm normally on top of these things, but I've been editing like crazy. It's amazing how much I can get done when I actually have the TIME to do it! Looking back, it seems a bit insane that I was juggling a full work week, keeping house, cooking meals, and devoting every spare minute to my career as an author. What is that, like 4 jobs? Sheesh.

Now that I have so much time to write and edit (and read...yippeee!) I'm finding myself completely absorbed by it. Get this...I even forgot about the internet today. AND I only turned on the T.V. once during lunch...ONCE! Me...who has a T.V. problem. So, let me just say that I may be a little more spacey these days, but that's because I'm practicing dialogue in my head and making crazy faces as I act out scenes silently to see if they sound good (yeah...I do that). Picture me sitting alone at my kitchen table making a mad face, then surprised eyes. Funny. If my neighbors are spying on me, they must think I've lost it.

In any case, I'm in deep. I'm really excited about Uprising (how cool is that? I actually get to use the book 2 title!).

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

HOORAY!! *jumps-flails-happy dance-wiggles* I finally have a release date for Children of the Gods #2! AND...dun dun duhhn...can finally announce THE TITLE.

I've been using this title as the "working title" for the manuscript since I started writing book 2. Thankfully, George Clooney hasn't (as of yet...) come out with another movie with the exact same name. So...are you ready? Are you ready?

.......

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Come on...I have to build some suspense here.

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THE TITLE OF CHILDREN OF THE GODS #2 IS....

February 19, 2013

Here's a little video of the song Uprising by Muse.

Quite appropriate I'd say, given the title and storyline of the book ;) Enjoy!

Don't forget to add it on GoodReads! :) Thanks for being excited with me!!

Monday, July 2, 2012

Chances are you've already heard of these two amazing authors, but I had the pleasure of going to lunch with these lovely ladies over the weekend. Lucky me!

Bethany is known all over the blogging world for her Stories About Melissa series and Sheri's The Little Rose is the #1 best-selling children's book on amazon. Let's just say I was very excited to sit down with them and pick their brains.

Ta Ta For Now! Melissa begins her
freshman year with one goal in mind, getting Brian Jackson to be her
boyfriend. She will soon learn that things don't necessarily turn out
the way you plan them, the value of true friendship, and the importance
of family.

XOXOXOMelissa has learned a
lot since her freshman year began, but it isn’t over yet! Her world is
about to change again with the birth of her new sibling, and she has to
figure out how she will adjust to being the eldest of five kids. She,
Jess, and Jimmy are inseparable, and she is having a fantastic time
although she can’t help but miss Brian as she tries to learn how to deal
with his relationship with Layla. Everything seems to be happening at
once and that is when she is introduced to Ben Campbell, a senior at
Dearborn High, who becomes an interesting distraction as he helps her
deal with the new developments in her life.

CiaoMelissa has had a
fantastic summer hanging out with her friends and making new ones. Life
as she knows it will change when they all come together to begin their
sophomore year at Dearborn High. Connections will be made and
friendships will be tested. Will Melissa’s family and friends be able to
help her through the challenges she will face in the upcoming months?

The Little RoseThe Little Rose is a timeless, heartwarming story about embracing who
you really are. Finely detailed, irresistible illustrations bring to
life this endearing story of the Little Rose growing amongst a bed of
weeds.

Teased by the ugly weeds around her, the Little Rose nearly gives up but
then learns to accept and love herself for what she really is, a
beautiful rose.

The Little GnomeSet in a Victorian garden, The Little Gnome is a heartwarming tale about an adorable garden gnome experiencing the wonder of the four seasons for the first time.

When Summer changes to Fall and then to Winter, the Little Gnome learns
to look for the good in change. The enchanting story helps kids of all
ages embrace change while learning about the seasons.

About Me

Hi! Welcome to my blog!
I’m the author of the YA paranormal series, CHILDREN OF THE GODS & a new YA Contemporary fiction called CARRY ME HOME.
I have two boys (ages 2 & 4) which has done wonders for my sound effect skills. I'm now an expert at missile launching & explosion noises...Also, I'm pretty decent at wielding a lightsaber and building lego ships. So be prepared for some kid blogging in between the book updates. My days are spent taking care of munchkins, writing, and running Acorn Publishing, most likely in my pajamas.
Email me at therrien.jessica@gmail.com
Or visit my websites
www.JessicaTherrienBooks.com
www.AcornPublishingLLC.com